Mars (OVA): All of the Imagawa-Crushing Ambition, But With None of the Corporate Support

Previously on the Mars 45th Anniversary Retrospective:

"In the end, it's really easy to see why Mitsuteru Yokoyama's Mars wound up being a manga that would see interpretations over the course of three different decades. It's a high-concept idea at its heart, but as the story advances it doles out both frenetic action sequences that mix things up with each encounter as well as new tidbits of plot that introduce new details, revealing just enough of a multi-faceted story that the reader can chew on."

Four years after Mars' shocking final chapter appeared in Weekly Shonen Champion in early 1977, TMS would debut an anime titled Rokushin Gattai God Mars in late 1981. However, rather than simply adapt Mitsuteru Yokoyama's five-volume manga, God Mars only took the basic concept & instead told a completely original story, with Yokoyama himself giving the staff free reign. While new lead Takeru Myojin was similar to Mars in that he was sent to earth to destroy it with Gaia, the main difference is that he was sent down by Emperor Zuul of the planet Gishin as a baby, so he grew up loving humanity & decided to protect it with Gaia. Also, the titular "Six Gods" were changed into being five giant robots built by Takeru's father in order to protect his son, and now they can combine with Gaia to form the God Mars; Uraeus wasn't invited to the party. Finally, Takeru/Mars was given a sibling named Marg, who often fought his brother in battle for the side of Gishin, which in turn would help lead to the show's success, as women just loved shipping Takeru & Marg together in fan fiction; I mean, it's not like the horribly bland-looking giant robots were encouraging toy sales. After 64 episodes finishing at the tail end of 1982, as well as a feature-length recap/alternate telling film, God Mars would remain the sole anime adaptation of Yokoyama's Mars for over a decade, as loosely interpreted as it was, and today remains the most well known take of them all, manga or otherwise, even appearing a handful of times in the Super Robot Wars franchise. There was also a single-episode OVA in 1988 that put the focus on Marg, due to sustained popularity.

Six years after the God Mars OVA came out, though, Yokoyama's short manga would see new life, and this time in its original form... Somewhat.

Originally founded in 1988, Kamakura Super Station started making moves into co-producing anime around 1989, with the 12-episode OVA adaptation of Guyver: The Bio-Boosted Armor. In 1993, though, the now renamed KSS, Inc. started producing OVAs (& even some video games) on its own, starting with Mask of Zeguy, & before eventually going bankrupt in 2004 it was responsible for stuff like Fire Emblem: Mystery of the Emblem, Mighty Space Miners, Tattoon Master, Ogre Slayer, Golden Boy, Iczer Girl Iczelion, Maps (1994), Dangazier 3, Dragoon/Ryuki Densho, & Phantom the Animation, as well as numerous hentai under its Pink Pineapple label. Shockingly enough, a good majority of KSS' catalog did see release in North America during the 90s & 00s, especially during the VHS & early DVD days, and today Softgarage owns the rights to KSS' entire catalog. However, KSS apparently had a very strict policy when it came to OVAs, which was that only the first two episodes would be guaranteed to see release from the start, with more episodes only happening should sales warrant them. To be fair, this is understandable, since the OVA boom was over by this point & the market was much smaller & less lucrative. However, this didn't mean that KSS actually designed its OVAs to be only two episodes long, with potential for more, but rather KSS would simply leave stories unfinished if they undersold. For example, Mighty Space Miners was written for six episodes, and even had episode titles for all of them, but poor sales resulted in it being left unfinished after only the first two.

This is what would befall KSS' OVA adaptation of Mars in mid-1994, one of the rare KSS titles to NOT see English release, as only two episodes ever saw release on VHS & LD, despite plans to adapt the entire manga. However, unlike Mighty Space Miners, this take on Mars did see a two-volume novelization, subtitled Silent Crisis & Silent Harmageddon, that came out not long afterwards, and that apparently does tell the entire intended story. In fact, according to a conversation between director Junji Nishimura & writer Masashi Sogo recorded in these novelizations, they were hoping to create something that would even surpass Yasuhiro Imagawa's Giant Robo: The Day the Earth Stood Still, which by that point was four episodes through its (eventual) seven-episode run; talk about aiming high. Softgarage would eventually re-release the Mars OVA across two DVDs in 2002 & still offers it via streaming on its website as a digital rental; you can watch the first episode for free & it's not even region locked! So while I can't really judge this OVA on the merits as a full adaptation, I can at least see if there was potential in it, and if it truly had the possibility of even matching up with Imagawa's magnum opus, let alone come close to surpassing it.

Mars (Mitsuteru Yokoyama Manga): This Giant Robot Will Self-Destruct in Five Volumes

Born on June 18, 1934, Mitsuteru Yokoyama would be inspired to become a mangaka after reading Osamu Tezuka's Metropolis & would make his debut sometime in the mid-50s with Otonashi no Ken/The Soundless Sword, while also working in publicity for a movie studio in his home town of Kobe. He'd hit it big in 1956 with Tetsujin 28, the series generally attributed as the originator of the entire mecha genre; obviously, Yokoyama quit the movie company not long later. From that point on, Yokoyama would go on to become probably the most important mangaka in history that unfortunately gets little to no real attention in English-speaking fandom. In 1966, his manga Sally the Witch would be adapted into animation, becoming the first magical girl anime; Himitsu no Akko-chan predates Sally in terms of manga. In 1967 he debuted Giant Robo, which was made alongside a tokusatsu series he conceived, becoming an influential part of that medium. In 1969 & 1970 he debuted Iga no Kagemaru & Kamen no Ninja Akakage, which would help influence the general pop culture identity of ninja, alongside the earlier Kamui-den by Sanpei Shirato. In 1971 he debuted Babel II, an action series based around ESPers that not only helped innovate in terms of action spectacle, but also helped standardize having young teens take the starring role (as well as make the gakuran a commonly-seen outfit in such series). Finally, 1971 also saw the debut of Yokoyama's adaptation of iconic Chinese novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms, which wound up running for 60 volumes & even went further into the timeline than "Luo Guanzhong" did with the novel! Unfortunately, Yokoyama's life would be cut short on April 15, 2004 after a fire broke out in his home, passing away at age 69. Ironically enough, Yasuhiro Imagawa's anime based on Tetsujin 28 had debuted just a week prior to his death, so his life ended with the same title that his career skyrocketed with.

However, 2021 marks the 45th Anniversary of one of Mitsuteru Yokoyama's lesser-known works, though one that has had its own surprisingly lengthy legacy to it. So this March we take a look at Yokoyama's Mars, and the two direct anime adaptations it received.

Debuting in early 1976 in the pages of Weekly Shonen Champion magazine, which had previously serialized Babel II, Mars (not to be confused with the 1996-2000 shojo manga of the same name by Fuyumi Soryo, which even used ever-so-slightly different katakana) is a sci-fi series that would only run for a single year, totaling five volumes; Yokoyama even joked about how often he went back to the genre over & over in the author's notes. However, it wound up having a remarkable post-manga life to it, arguably more so than some of Yokoyama's more iconic works. First, anime studio TMS would ask Yokoyama for permission to make an anime based on Mars, with Yokoyama not only allowing it, but even going so far as to say "Do whatever you like with it". The end result was late 1981's Rokushin Gattai/Six Gods Combining God Mars, a TV mech anime simply based on Mars' general concept, but wound up becoming so massively successful (partially due to female fans falling in love with main character Takeru Myojin & his enemy/brother Marg, all despite the mech designs generally being absolutely terrible) that it was extended beyond its original planned length, ending in late 1982 after 64 episodes (making it one of the longer single-run mech anime in history), plus a recap movie & a Marg-focused OVA. To this day, God Mars is easily the most well known version of Mars, but since it's so wildly different in execution (not to mention its sheer length) I'll only make the occasional reference to it during this month. Then, in 1994, KSS Films would take a more direct approach & produce an OVA adaptation more directly based on Yokoyama's original manga, but poor sales resulted in only two episodes ever being made; we'll get into more detail regarding this OVA next time. Finally, in 2002, Mars was given a third anime adaptation, the 13-episode TV series Shin Seiki Den Mars, as part of AT-X's "Famous Author Series" of anime productions, which we'll get to last via Retrospect in Retrograde; this is generally considered the most accurate of the adaptations. From the 70s to the 00s, Mitsuteru Yokoyama's Mars saw life once every single decade it existed, only for the streak to end this past decade with the 2010s.

So to celebrate the manga's 45th Anniversary, let's first take a look at Yokoyama's original manga, which was fully fan translated some years ago, & see what made it so appealing that it kept coming back over & over & over almost every decade.

Obscusion B-Side: Transforming Ghosts' Adventures in Wii Recon: Next Level's 2010 Rail-Shooter Duology

Based in Vancouver & established in 2002, Canadian developer Next Level Games got its start developing 2003's NHL Hitz Pro, the final entry in the hockey equivalent to Midway's iconic NBA Jam & NFL Blitz. Following that, the studio would enter a relationship with Nintendo, developing Super Mario Strikers for the GameCube in 2005 & sequel Mario Strikers Charged for the Wii in 2007. These two games were just the start of a strong partnership with the Japanese gaming giant that has since resulted in Punch-Out!! for the Wii in 2009, Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon & Metroid Prime: Federation Force for the 3DS in 2013 & 2016, & most recently Luigi's Mansion 3 for the Switch in 2019, almost all of which were received rather well (that Metroid game notwithstanding); there was even an unreleased Mario-themed volleyball game that went unknown until 2014. This relationship has been so strong that Next Level announced that it would work with Nintendo exclusively after 2014, & just last month Nintendo announced that it had purchased the studio outright, with the acquisition planned to finalize at the start of March. So, in this final month of independent life for the studio, I want to take a look at a pair of games Next Level developed that came out in 2010 that are interestingly similar, despite being published by two different companies & based on two completely different licenses, and see if their less-than-stellar reception at the time was due to actual game quality, or if they were simply victims of Nintendo's most successful system ever.

By the time 2010 came around, it was becoming more & more obvious that while the Nintendo Wii might be outselling Microsoft's Xbox 360 & Sony's PlayStation 3 by wide margins, its under-powered architecture meant that it wasn't really able to deliver the same experience when it came to certain games made for the competition. Sure, you had admirable & honestly unbelievable ports, like for the Call of Duty series, but for the most part the Wii got one of two options: A completely different game that was only related to what was coming out on the HD-compatible consoles... or just not getting anything at all. That was the conundrum Next Level Games found itself in the first year of the 2010s, and my only guess is that the studio got approached by two companies at around the same exact time, because that's the only way to explain what happened here. Anyway, June 22 saw Activision release Transformers: War for Cybertron, a third-person shooter by High Moon Studios that served as a prequel to the classic "Generation 1 era" of the franchise, detailing the war between the Autobots & Decepticons over on their home planet of Cybertron, long before the two sides crash landed on Earth. This saw release on PS3, 360 & PC, while the Nintendo DS saw a dual-release by Vicarious Visions that adapted the two campaigns across two games, one for the Autobots & one for the Decepticons. As for the Wii, Activision released Transformers: Cybertron Adventures, a rail shooter that acted as a "companion game" that took place during the plot of War for Cybertron. To say that it wasn't well received would be a bit of an understatement, though there were some positive reviews that acted as outliers, including one by Jim Sterling, who worked for Destructoid at the time & was notoriously contrarian very often (that's not a dig at Sterling, mind you).

Five months later, on November 16, Ubisoft (&, no, I will never get used to that name being only one word) released Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon for the Wii, which despite the simplistic title was not a mere port of the original game from 2001. Instead, it was a rail shooter similar to (but not exactly like) Transformers: Cybertron Adventures, but in this case the game wasn't developed to act as a "companion" to any new game in the franchise, unless you want to count Ghost Recon Predator, a PSP game that came out on the same exact day as the Wii game in North America (but was released a month earlier in Europe & Australia). No, this Wii entry was effectively the franchise's "main attraction" for consoles in that year & was also the first new entry in the franchise since 2007's Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2; there also wouldn't be another console entry until 2012, not counting Shadow Wars for the 3DS in 2011. To say that it wasn't well received would be a bit of an understatement, though there were some positive reviews that acted as outliers; sorry, but no Jim Sterling review this time around. What's interesting is that, outside of some shared animators, the two games feature mostly different staffs behind them, despite being very similar conceptually. In particular, the games were individually directed by Jason Carr & Michael Inglehart, respectively, who had teamed up to co-direct Punch-Out!! the previous year. Ghost Recon (Wii) would be Inglehart's last directed game at Next Level, before founding mobile developer Hothead Games in 2011.

Personally, I've always been curious about whether these two Next Level Games productions are truly all that bad, or if they were victims of just not simply being what people really wanted from them, whether that meant being a partial lie by way of its marketing or being looked at as bad joke by people who really wanted "GRAW 3".

Obscusion B-Side: Headhunter & Its Thrust-Upon Mission to "Kill" Metal Gear Solid

Whenever something innovates & become a standard setter, it's only natural for others to take advantage of what it did & follow that path. For video games this has been essentially the natural way of life, whether it was Atari's Pong leading to the proliferation of "Pong Consoles" during the 70s, Nintendo's Super Mario Bros. leading to the NES/Famicom becoming filled with platformers, Sega's Sonic the Hedgehog leading to the mascot craze of the 90s, & so on. Sometimes, a game effectively creates an entire genre in & of itself, resulting in said game becoming the literal name for the genre, like how id Software's Doom lead to all games like it being deemed "Doom clones" until the term "first-person shooter/FPS" became more widely accepted, or how Michael Toy, Glenn Wichman, & Ken Arnold's Rogue still remains the namesake for the roguelike genre, even 41 years after it first came out. That being said, sometimes a game becomes so popular that other games similar to it that would come out later are given a different terminology, usually by journalists in an effort to help hype up games that they themselves are excited about, even if the end result is only similar on a surface level.

I'm talking about the "[insert game here] killer" label, and in particular how Sega & Amuze's Headhunter was stuck with it.

Back in late 1998, Konami released Metal Gear Solid, Hideo Kojima's return to the two 8-bit stealth-action games he had made for the MSX computer (plus an infamous NES port of the first) back in 1987 & 1990, respectively. With gameplay focused around being stealthy that the large majority of people had never experienced before (at least on console), a striking visual style by Yoji Shinkawa, an instantly memorable cast of characters (combined with stellar English voice work, especially for the era), amazing music (even if the main theme was later found to be way too similar to Georgy Sviridov's "Winter Road" for Konami's comfort), & a story filled with all manner of subversion of expectations & fourth-wall breaking tricks (which would only be dialed up more in the sequels), it's no surprise that MGS would go on to sell over seven million copies worldwide & turn the Metal Gear franchise into one of the most renown in the industry (at least until Konami decided to burn as many bridges as possible with its game development staff over time), while also popularizing the stealth genre as a whole, alongside the original Tenchu & Thief games from that same year.

Therefore, while people were essentially salivating over the eventual release of Metal Gear Solid 2, gaming journalists started noticing a game in development for the Sega Dreamcast titled Headhunter. Featuring a mysterious-looking action hero who can use stealth to either avoid confrontation or take out enemies covertly, a similar-looking radar system, & even VR missions (which itself was turned into its own bonus release for MGS in 1999), it pretty much instantly started getting labeled as the "Metal Gear Solid killer" in previews. Unfortunately, the incoming death of Sega's final console resulted in Headhunter being one the last PAL-exclusive releases, though if you use something like a boot disc on an NTSC console the game will still display just fine, showing that it likely still included support for 60 Hz displays; coincidentally, Headhunter came out just three days after MGS2 did on the PS2. However, Sega's move to being a third-party did result in Headhunter also coming out on the PS2, via Acclaim, in March of 2002 in Europe, with North America finally receiving the game later that May. Unfortunately, while the original Dreamcast version received tons of praise at the time, those few months of difference resulted in the PS2 port not being received quite as well, though still generally positive; today, the Dreamcast version is considered superior, with slightly better visuals & more stable performance. Still, Headhunter must have done well enough for a sequel, since Headhunter Redemption would come out in mid-2004 for both PS2 & Xbox in Europe & North America, this time beating Metal Gear Solid 3 to market by a few months.Unfortunately, developer Amuze would go out of business in 2005, having only made these two games, plus a couple that never saw completion.

Obscusion B-Side: Maximum Chase: The Only Thing Missing is Don LaFontaine Narrating the Trailer!

Microsoft's first video game console, the original Xbox, didn't see release in Japan until February 22, 2002, being the second region in the world to receive it. The company was hoping to give the console more of a worldwide appeal by bringing in Japanese third-parties to develop original games, and while it didn't help systems sales in Japan (where it never even broke 500,000 units), it certainly wasn't for a lack of trying. While there weren't a ton a Japan-created titles in the OG Xbox's nigh-1,000 game catalog, only 47 of them actually stayed exclusive to the region, though that still includes the likes of Magatama, Double-S.T.E.A.L. - The Second Clash (a.k.a. "Wreckless 2"), Shin Megami Tensei: Nine, Rent-A-Hero No. 1, & the original version of Metal Wolf Chaos. The second Japan-developed game that Microsoft Japan published, after Media.Vision's Nezmix/Sneakers, wound up being Genki's Maximum Chase, which saw release in its home country on September 26, 2002; this was Genki's third & final Xbox game, after Kabuki Warriors & Phantom Crash.

Though the game uses letterboxing for cinematic effect,
I'll only be keeping them for relevant screenshots.

Though inspired by Hollywood movie chase sequences & starring "gaijin talent" for its live-action FMV cutscenes, the game wouldn't actually see international release until November 3, 2003, when Majesco Entertainment suddenly licensed it from Microsoft for North America; there was no European release, sadly. At the time the game was dinged points partially for being sold at standard MSRP at the time ($50), even though it was more of an arcade-like experience, but this game wound up being only the start of bigger things. As the life of the Xbox went on, Microsoft had plans to release games like Yukio Futatsugi's Phantom Dust & Double Fine's Psychonauts in North America, but wound up cancelling both releases in 2004. Luckily, both did eventually see release, and their savior was one & the same: Majesco Entertainment. Personally, I feel that Majesco bringing over Maximum Chase is what gave the company the opportunity to then rescue both of those later games from their respective fates (Japanese exclusivity & Unreleased Hell), but what about this first game itself? Let's take a look at Genki's original Xbox swan song, see what it aimed to do, & if it's worth a play today, nearly 20 years after the console's North American launch.

After beating his partner Det. Ervin Barret in a gun range target shoot-out, "traffic cop" Det. Rick Summer of the LAPD gets into his 1970 Chevrolet Camaro to enjoy his day off by attending a baseball game. While waiting at a red light, a woman suddenly enters Rick's car, saying that her name is Catherine Stanfield & asking for help. While Rick initially wants to shrug her off as a crazy person, they're suddenly shot at by unknown assailants, resulting in the two gunning it to escape... And Rick just washed his car! Rick now has to figure out why people want Catherine dead, and eventually how all of this relates to LA's "King of Narcotics" named Coleman & an ex-Soviet hitman named Ivan, both of whom Rick has dealt with in the past, & a new energy bomb code named "Overflare".